I have some of those asian paper lanterns, but the cords are horrendous and tangly down the walls. Does anybody have any clever ideas to conceal these hanging cords? I'd greatly appreciate any suggestions or tips.

I re-wired a nifty hanging lamp for a friend once. To mask the wire, I bought decorator chain from the hardware store and wove the cord in and out of the chain, just like you see old lamps. They sell the chain at hardware stores by the foot and it usually comes in gold-tone, silver-tone, black and white, and sometimes even dark green. It's a light-weight chain, only intended for just this purpose.

Only problem with that is, you have to put the wire through the chain before you put the plug on, so unless your lanterns have petite little plugs, this might not work. I don't know how many cords you are talking about concealing, but you could conceivably put more than one cord in one piece of chain.

You could build a box out of pieces of crown molding. They usually come in 8ft lengths, which is usually the height from floor to ceiling, and they are usually only a few dollars per piece. If you bought one pretty piece of 3inch crown molding for $2.99 and a couple of plain old pine 1 x 2's for $0.99 and then just tacked them together with finishing nails, you could then paint to match your walls or stain to make it stand out, and just run the cords through that. (Of course you would need to cut notches out for the cords to slip into.) Also, if you got really creative, you could also buy a cheap round wood table-top, cut it in half and cut squares out of the center to match the size of your modling box, then use regular shelf brackets to mount the tops to the wall to make it look like the thing is just an interesting little table. Double function and OH so pretty!

I don't know how many lamps you have, but you could gather all of the cords to a corner and braid them all the way down and the braid sits all the way down the corner of the two walls. Mine looks cool like that and it's better than having wires hanging everwhere.

Cords really annoy me. For some reason my eyeis always drawn right to them. What is really bothersome is on all these decorator shows they will have these horrid cords stretched across the newly painted walls. You have paint there PAINT THE CORDS!!! Also you can make a tube out of material and slip over the cord.